Recurrent Spatio-Temporal Point Process for Check-in Time Prediction

Abstract

We introduce a new problem, namely, check-in time prediction where the goal is to predict the time when a given user will check-in to a location of interest. We design a novel Recurrent Spatio-Temporal Point Process (RSTPP) model for check-in time prediction. RSTPP addresses two key challenges: 1) Data scarcity due to uneven distribution of check-ins among users/locations. 2) User trajectories contain valuable information that is ignored by standard temporal point process which only considers historical event times. RSTPP is designed to learn the latent dependencies of event times over both historical events and spatio-temporal information about locations a user visited before check-in to the location of interest. We evaluate RSTPP on several real-world datasets, and it significantly outperforms state-of-the-art event time predicting techniques. Our work derives a set of practical implications that can benefit a wide spectrum of applications.